IAB Study Reveals: Industry Lags in Developing Protocols for Marketing AI Initiatives
About 40% of media buyers are using AI for planning or activation. But only half of them have protocols to mandate human review of the output or to guard brand safety.
I get that we're still early in the AI journey, but I think that finding - embedded in IAB's 2025 Outlook report (download link) - should be a wakeup call for the ad industry.
The most common protocol - cited by 52% - was having mandatory human oversight of the outputs. Next highest was brand safety, where 48% said they had protocols.
If your company is using AI for job functions, it's going to be important to get those percentages much, much higher.
When I interviewed senior digital marketing leaders for a research project last year I identified three things marketers can do to emulate what digital leaders are doing:
Use a bespoke AI platform, trained on your company's data
Create rules for AI usage and assign a person or task force to implement and oversee them
Upload brand guidelines to a bespoke AI and have a human check all outputs
Want to learn more about how digital marketing leaders are approaching AI in the marketing process?? Read my white paper “Unlocking AI for Creative Generation and Optimization” in partnership with Ascendant Network and Yieldmo.
